Related papers: Endogenous Quality in Social Learning
We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is…
Making an informed decision -- for example, when choosing a career or housing -- requires knowledge about the available options. Such knowledge is generally acquired through costly trial and error, but this learning process can be disrupted…
We present a subjective equilibrium notion (called "subjective equilibrium under beliefs of exogenous uncertainty (SEBEU)" for stochastic dynamic games in which each player chooses her decisions under the (incorrect) belief that a…
We consider a large population of learning agents noncooperatively selecting strategies from a common set, influencing the dynamics of an exogenous system (ES) we seek to stabilize at a desired equilibrium. Our approach is to design a…
We present an extensive study of the foreshock and aftershock signatures accompanying peaks of book sales. The time series of book sales are derived from the ranking system of Amazon.com. We present two independent ways of classifying…
Can players sustain long-run trust when their equilibrium beliefs are shaped by machine-learning methods that penalize complexity? I study a game in which an infinite sequence of agents with one-period recall decides whether to place trust…
Reputation is not just a simple opinion that an individual has about another but a social construct that emerges through communication. Despite the huge importance in coordinating human behavior, such a communicative aspect has remained…
Recent increase in online privacy concerns prompts the following question: can a recommender system be accurate if users do not entrust it with their private data? To answer this, we study the problem of learning item-clusters under local…
This paper studies sequential search models that (1) incorporate unobserved product quality, which can be correlated with endogenous observable characteristics (such as price) and endogenous search cost variables (such as product rankings…
In the Learning to Price setting, a seller posts prices over time with the goal of maximizing revenue while learning the buyer's valuation. This problem is very well understood when values are stationary (fixed or iid). Here we study the…
We propose a multi-agent distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that balances between potentially conflicting short-term reward and sparse, delayed long-term reward, and learns with partial information in a dynamic environment. We…
Market share and quality, or customer satisfaction, go together. Yet inferring one from the other appears difficult. Indeed, such an inference would need detailed information about customer behavior, and might be clouded by modes of…
We study long-run market stability for repeated price competitions between two firms, where consumer demand depends on firms' posted prices and consumers' price expectations called reference prices. Consumers' reference prices vary over…
We study a repeated sender-receiver game where inspections are public but the sender's action is hidden unless inspected. A detected deception ends the relationship or triggers a finite punishment. We show the public state is one…
This paper considers incentives to provide goods that are partially shareable along social links. We introduce a model in which each individual in a social network not only decides how much of a shareable good to provide, but also decides…
Reputation is one of key mechanisms to maintain human cooperation, but its analysis gets complicated if we consider the possibility that reputation does not reach consensus because of erroneous assessment. The difficulty is alleviated if we…
We extend the study of learning in games to dynamics that exhibit non-asymptotic stability. We do so through the notion of uniform stability, which is concerned with equilibria of individually utility-seeking dynamics. Perhaps surprisingly,…
We study optimal monopoly pricing over consumer networks governed by general nonlinear utilities. In our framework, a consumer's utility is jointly determined by an individualized price and the consumption choices of their peers, propagated…
We consider social learning in a changing world. Society can remain responsive to state changes only if agents regularly act upon fresh information, which limits the value of social learning. When the state is close to persistent, a…
Machine learning is traditionally studied at the model level: researchers measure and improve the accuracy, robustness, bias, efficiency, and other dimensions of specific models. In practice, the societal impact of machine learning is…